Dragonwriter (13 page)

It wasn't until the 1980s, though, that Anne changed my life.

I had spent my teenage years attempting to write short stories and submitting them to magazines like
Asimov's
and
Analog
and
Omni.
The professional markets were black holes to drop stories into. Each story generated identical form rejection letters. Was I submitting anything near what you could call a short story? The badly mimeographed form letters gave no clue. How did you move from a few thousand words of a short story to a novel? How did you create an entire other world? Nothing I could get my hands on explained the mysterious process.

I went to college and minored in English Writing. I took every undergraduate fiction class that they gave. The professors all forbade me from writing science fiction, and none of them tackled novels. Four years, and I was left just as clueless as I started. When I graduated, computers were just appearing on office desks. Word processing was in its infancy. The internet was yet to be commercialized.

I've watched other people write endless short stories, submit them to professional markets, and slowly lose faith in their abilities because they were beating themselves against immovable rocks. There was a chance I might have followed, eventually giving up hope on being a writer.

In college, though, I had made one very important friend. Her name was June Drexler Robertson. She loaned me her extensive collection of science fiction novels. She taught me
Dungeons & Dragons.
She tutored me in physics and Greek mythology. And she knew the coolest people. They were fen, as they liked to be called, using the irregular plural of “fan” to mean only one particular type of fan, a person that attended science fiction conventions.

Originally, fandom was only focused on books and mostly ignored television and movies. This was, in part, because there was so little of it.
Star Trek
changed that. After it was canceled, its fans were desperate for more. Largely ignored by the programming staff of regular science fiction conventions, they gathered together in the hallways to discuss their favorite shows. They started to write stories based on the
Star Trek
characters in what became known as fanfic and passed it around to each other. Finally they started to hold their own conventions, nicknamed by the other fens (with a sneer in their voice) as media cons. The sneer came from the fact that unlike other conventions, they were often run by for-profit companies that paid the actors of canceled TV series to appear. In 1978, the media con subculture started the fan-run MediaWest Convention in Michigan.

At MediaWest, there was a large and hungry crowd of fen looking for more of what it loved. The authors of fanfic no longer had to pass out stories to one or two friends that they met by chance; they could now sell it in the dealer's room. These were borderline to outright illegal magazines, infringing on copyrights willy-nilly, hand-typed, mimeographed, and badly stapled. These “zines” were tailored for the masses, featuring the main characters of television shows, and thus tailored toward stories that were collected to be sold. They started with
Star Trek
and expanded. They included
Star Wars, Blake 7, Battlestar Galactica,
and
Man from Uncle,
just to name a few.

People—well, actually, mostly women for some reason—who had been lost and alone in their hometown could find like-minded fans just by standing by the table selling “fanzines” of what they liked. To stay in contact, they created fan clubs.

A new form of fanfic developed out of these clubs. Instead of focusing on the main characters of the work, each member had a chance to live in the fictional world via a new and original character that was wholly their own creation. They could be an ensign on the
Enterprise.
They could be a viper pilot on the
Galactica
or its sister ship, the
Pegasus.
They could be a wolf rider elf in Wendy Pini's Elfquest universe.

Or they could be a dragonrider on Pern.

Pre-internet, the Facebook of fen were APAs, or Amateur Press Associations. Each member of an APA would type up a page or two (or more if they had the time and money) and duplicate their pages as many times as there were members. Content ranged from book reviews to essays on current trends to personal journals. If an APA had thirty members, each member would make thirty copies of their section. Remember that while there were photocopiers available, they were expensive, often a quarter a page at a time when a can of soda was thirty cents. Since mimeographs had been around forever, people often used old machines they'd bought secondhand. The members would mail the copies of their section to a central mailer. She would collate everyone's sections, create a cover and an index, bind all the pages together into a magazine, and mail it to the members.

The fanfic clubs created a hybrid of the APA. They started up newsletters where each member would write a section and mail it to the editor. Dues would not only cover the cost of mailing the newsletter but also the copying cost. The editor was often the person with access to some type of cheap duplicating machine.

Up to 1984, I was totally ignorant of most of fandom. That summer, though, my friend June Drexler Robertson turned to me and said, “Your family has a large farm, doesn't it?”

My reaction was probably the same as yours is now.
What? Huh?

June had joined a Pern fanfic club. She didn't have to explain Pern to me; I had all of Anne's books. It was “fanfic club” that I needed explained. It turned out that all around the world, fans of Anne's were finding each other and creating clubs where they could live on Pern via shared fiction.

Sharing, however, meant that not everyone could be a queen rider that could hear all dragons. (Yes, almost every new member had to be told that they couldn't hear all the dragons nor that they could automatically be a queen rider; otherwise, the weyr would have been fifty queen riders and two or three very happy but exhausted bronze riders.) Since fictional leadership somehow overruled common sense, it turned out that for a club to function, the people who ran the club had to take up the key positions. The Weyrleader, Senior Queen, and Weyrsinger went to the people that created the club, covered costs when dues fell short, scoured conventions for new members, collected material for the newsletters, copied them, and mailed them. That way a member wouldn't be telling the “club officers” that they could buck the system because “the Weyrwoman said I could.”

Every new member was encouraged to think beyond Lessa to create a different kind of character, often to fill a gap in the weyr. Journeyman harper was the favorite second choice. Once a talented author took over a craft and their story appeared in the newsletter, other members would drift toward that choice. Woodcrafting became popular in our club after Melissa Crandall took over the weyr's woodshop and wrote sections so vivid you could nearly smell the sawdust.

Another overlap of fiction and reality was the location of the club. The clubs were fiercely territorial despite the fact that technology made it difficult if not impossible to coordinate the fictional worlds. Once a club laid claim to a weyr or a hold, they would defend it from other clubs using it as their home. I think that it came from the fact that different clubs would come up with slight variations on the world, and they didn't want to be confused with other clubs with a radically different spin on Pern.

Ista Weyr was the first fan club with its leadership based in New Orleans. Fort Weyr was a close second. When all the northern weyrs were taken, the Southern Continent was divvied up into wholly fan-created slices. After that, new clubs decided to move forward in time. Fort Weyr Tenth Pass was a totally different beast than Fort Weyr Ninth Pass.

While the initial meeting of members had been at conventions (because there was no internet to provide a way to find each other otherwise), the clubs began to hold Gathers. My friend June was looking for a campground for the third annual Gather of her club and remembered that my family had a farm with a large open field perfect for camping.

We had thirty-some people that summer of 1984. I was twenty-one, fresh out of college, still desperate to be a writer, but unsure how actually to go about it. I was skeptical of this whole “fan club” idea, but the members all shared my love of science fiction. They had Anne's book memorized. They had made giant papier-mâché eggs with little statues of dragons inside for candidates to impress. (They crack like gunshots when you smash them open.) We ate roast wherry (turkey) and homemade bubbly pies and sang late into the night, led by the Weyrsinger who played the guitar. It was a lot of fun, but I wasn't hooked yet.

Toward the end of the weekend, someone handed me the club's little ten-page newsletter called the Harper Beat. It was created by pasting text onto eleven-by-seventeen-inch paper, photocopying it, and folding it in half, so it created a booklet. One page was a report from the Weyrwoman, who was the club's founder and president. The vice president was the Weyrleader, and his report was called Kreelings. They talked about club memberships and activities and their daily lives. I ignored those two columns. What hooked me was that the rest of the newsletter was a story. Eight pages of fluff from the Weyrsinger filled with everything I loved about Pern. The dragons. The fire-lizards. The weyr.

“June says you write. Why don't you write something for the newsletter?”

I had never considered writing fanfic before. I had no desire to create stories set in someone else's world. The fan club, though, offered two things I couldn't resist: an editor and an audience.

They explained Anne's rules to me. At the time you couldn't use any of Anne's characters nor could you set any story in Benden Weyr. A club whose members were air force pilots with “silver dragons” triggered a rule that only Anne's standard five colors could be used. Men couldn't ride gold dragons and women weren't allowed to ride bronzes. And of course, we weren't allowed to sell our fiction.

I sat down and tried to write the persona I had used all weekend. He was a brown rider from another weyr. His weyr-mate had recently died, and his grief had caused him to come in conflict with his wingleader. The trouble had escalated to a knife fight. He'd won the fight only to be transferred out before more trouble could follow. He was an angst-ridden, battered man. I wrote him coming to the new weyr and handed the “story” to the editor, Julia Ecklar. (Yes, the club fostered two John Campbell award winners. Julia won the award in 1991, and I won in 2003.)

“It's nice,” she said in a tone that clearly meant that it was barely acceptable. “It's just not a real story. It's a vignette.”

“A what?”

“Vignette. Slice of life. A
story
is when a hero has a problem. See, in my story, the Weyrsinger discovers the problem in the first scene. In the second scene, he attempts to fix the problem and only makes it worse. Third scene, he attempts again and fails. Fourth scene, he resolves the problem. That's a story. I'm practicing telling a story with only four scenes, but you can take more.”

This triggered a great deal of rereading famous SF short stories to verify that she was completely correct. (Her method of limiting the number of scenes turns out to be a great way to focus on what a scene is about and why you're writing it.)

Well, I couldn't wrap my brain around what kind of difficulties would face a middle-age widower bonded to an animal the size of a small jet. I was twenty-one and still working on the whole first serious boyfriend thing. I scrapped the brown rider and came up with a new character, one whose problems would be easier to grasp. His name was Zachafiddel, but he was nicknamed Zac. He was a twelve-year-old apprentice beast herder who took care of the flocks of wherries that the dragons fed on. He was new to the weyr, ignorant of how things worked, and had an abusive journeyman.

I wrote up a short story and sat nervously as Julia read it. After a few minutes, she sighed and handed it back. “It's still a vignette.”

It took two more attempts before I grasped “story.” The newsletter was published every other month, so I managed to write six stories before the next annual Gather. I basked in the glow of people telling me that they liked my writing and loved my character. Zac grew up as time passed, becoming a journeyman beast herder, and then searched as a candidate. Eventually he impressed a bronze and changed his name to Z'del.

The club grew, and what the members read in the newsletter encouraged them to also write stories about their characters. Like me, several were learning the craft before breaking out into their own fiction. We had solid writing skills. What we lacked was the ability to take it to novel length in a world of our own creation.

Anne had created a rich and detailed world. The wonderful thing about fanfic writing is that you're free to ignore world-building at first; your audience knows all the cool details that the creator laid into place. I could write about my character stripping off his wherhides as he walked into his weyr, uncovering the glows to light his way, and then using soapsand to bathe without having to invent and explain anything. I could focus on getting my character through four scenes to set up and solve a problem.

Once I got short story structure nailed down, I discovered that I could create two levels of conflict. The surface level would be a simple world problem that gave my character something to do while he struggled with inner emotional conflict. The two could be thematically connected but otherwise unrelated. The mental lightbulb went on while I was writing a story about Zac attending a Gather immediately after walking the tables and becoming a journeyman. He's been charged with keeping all the boys he'd been an apprentice with under control. He's distracted, though, by his girlfriend asking him to move in together.

The outer conflict is trying to have fun with his girlfriend while keeping track of the younger boys in thick crowds, breaking up fist fights, and chasing accidently freed herd animals. These are all things out of his control; he can only react to them.